Reconnecting with community

Until recently, the classic response of urbanites discontent with the hectic pace of modern city living was flight to the suburbs, where privacy and anonymity are assured, as are the endless spirals of identical, uninspired houses. The co-housing movement seeks to reverse this trend by creating spaces for communal living, where neighbors actually depend on instead of avoid each other. Compartmentalized existence, they say, causes a lot of unhappiness.

"We've stopped counting on our neighbors, and we try to live on our own, but we're suppressing our real needs," said Anita Michajluková, a psychologist and member of Cohousing.cz, an organization that promotes the co-housing philosophy and people who want to form groups and build co-housing projects. "Especially when we have small children, we find out how lonely we are and that it's really in our nature to live together."

Originally a Nordic novelty, co-housing experiments began popping up in Denmark in the early 1970s but quickly spread to Sweden and the Netherlands. Nowadays, the shared-space wisdom is gaining traction around the world, with a handful of groups and projects in the Czech Republic, as well.

A co-housing community is comprised of private homes next to each other with shared facilities, often in the form of a "common house," where residents can cook together, play a game of table tennis, use the Internet or engage in other social activities. Another common feature of co-housing communities is the emphasis on exchanging services and doing favors for one another - for example, with childcare, carpooling or home repairs.

Though most co-housing neighborhoods start with a group of people who want to create an intentional community and know each other before they build the homes, one real estate developer has taken notice of homebuyers' increasing desire to live in this type of environment, and is planning a residential project called Zahrada in the tranquil town of Lysá nad Labem, northeast of Prague, that incorporates many of the principals of the co-housing philosophy, though they say this is just a happy coincidence.

"We wanted to create a kind of hardware for people's lives - a platform for a certain lifestyle that was later called co-housing by other people," said Michal Šourek, director of MS Development, the investor behind Zahrada. "We want to create a town-like atmosphere, and this was the chance to do that in a small town."

Construction on the 13 buildings that will comprise the Zahrada project is set to start this summer, eventually providing 257 apartments in a vehicle-free pedestrian zone surrounded by greenery, gazebos, parks and playgrounds. There will also be "service center" where residents can do everything from babysitting for their neighbors, to washing their cars or even stabling horses.

"Our target group is families and young people who intend to have children or already have children and people who are economically active and their profession doesn't require them to go to Prague every morning and they can work from home a few days per week," Šourek said, adding that about 10 percent of the apartments will come with a separate studio workspace for residents who work from home.

Fed up with what he calls "the rat race," Tomáš Hajzler and his family have taken the opposite approach, by searching for other families they could build a co-housing community with beforehand through their group Kde domov můj (Where Is My Home).

"People think the smartest way to live in our part of the world is that Monday through Friday you just go to work, and in the evening you're tired and you don't want to see your neighbors," Hajzler said. "We barely know our neighbors, and we've really tried. It's so much easier to have people around you if you've had enough of being independent, which is not the road to happiness."

František Cihlář, whose group Český cohousing includes eight families who want to build a community together somewhere outside of Prague, explains that although many Czechs are still averse to communal living because of their experience with communism, things are slowly changing.

"We had experience with the community way of thinking under communism. It was called cooperatives. Part of it was a very good idea, but as with everything else in communist times, it wasn't done properly," Cihlář said. "The first reaction after 1989 was that most people lost their trust in the idea of anything community-oriented. They wanted to go toward private living, but now they want to revisit what a community can offer. I myself have a very strong need to live with other people."

As a psychologist, Michajluková knows firsthand that managing conflict in a group setting can be challenging, but that living in a community where one is needed and needs others brings its own rewards, though it's not for everyone.

"Maintaining relationships is demanding, and not everyone is willing to invest in it," she said. "But for me, I've known since I was a child that I wanted to live with other people."

Emily Thompson can be reached at
ethompson@praguepost.com